Depression
Any advice for a teen battling depression? My Aunt suspects I am, and she is right, I AM. But I don't want her or my parents to know because they are already worried because I don't eat as much as I should. No breakfast, small lunch, maybe dinner. I am not suicidal or anyting, but I do know I am depressed. I have tried figuring out why, because
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In most cases, drugs are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overprescribed.
Ironically, those with a Unipolar Mood Disorder are the least likely to seek out medication. Indeed, the nature of the disorder causes one to avoid the very medication(s) that would aleviate the disorder.
It's as if diabetes caused diabetics to actively avoid insulin.
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Just as poor physical hygiene worsens your physical health, poor mental hygiene worsens your mental health.
What d_rec_ks has described is a completely different beast. Practicing Good Mental Hygiene may help prevent his symptoms from getting worse (or, at least, prevent a decline from accelerating). But it won't improve his symptoms any more than good physical hygiene will cause an untreated diabetic to start producing insulin.
This is why my subject is, "Depression: 'Feeling Sad' vs. 'Being a Teenager' vs. 'Unipolar Mood Disorder'". The last one, the Unipolar Mood Disorder, is highly-resistant to internal attempts to thwart it and behaves randomly to external stimuli. That's (part of) what makes it a disorder, not magnitude or severity.
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- Loss of libido.
- Loss of appetite.
- Disrupted sleep patterns, or total disappearance of any sleep pattern.
- Lack or loss of motivation.
- "Inappropriate" feelings of guilt. ("Inappropriate" meaning that the things you're feeling guilty about are not things you caused or could have possible caused.)
- Loss of interest in things that were once pleasurable. (Or, as I put it, losing the ability to feel pleasure, so that you're just going through the motions.)
- Positive events, funny things, etc. have little to no effect, or don't last as long as they do in others.
- Very low self-esteem (Or as I've quipped, "I am the Lowest of the Low and Source of All Evil in the Universe®.")
- And, of course, "feeling blue". Or, as I put it, you don't feel better than, "Eh, ok I guess."
- And, in severe or perniciously-chronic cases, suicidal ideation.
(These may not exactly match the DSM-IV listing, but they're what I use to check myself.)You have most of them. Therefore, by what I recall of the DSM-IV's definition, you're suffering from a Unipolar Mood Disorder.
The appropriate course of action is the same course of action you'd take if you suddenly lost all feeling in your left arm: seek medical attention from the appropriate specialist. For the numb left-arm, you'd go to an orthopedist. For the Unipolar Mood Disorder, you'll see a psychiatrist (for medication management) and/or a psychologist/licensed social worker (for cognitive therapy and symptom monitoring).
As for antidepressants: they do not make you feel happy.
Antidepressants relieve most of the symptoms (that I listed above) in most of the people most of the time. Different ones work better for different brains. They take time to work - 2 weeks to a month.
And they don't alleviate all of the symptoms all at once. They may relieve your loss of appetite before your loss of interest in pleasurable activities. Or they could improve your motivation first. (Consider this: someone's in the throes of a major episode, with suicidality. She's prescribed an antidepressant. The first symptom that this antidepressant relieves for her just so happens to be the loss-of-motivation one. So, now, she's still has suicidal thoughts, but has her motivation back. Uh Oh!) Or, one may alleviate only half of the symptoms, or half-alleviate all of the symptoms. In that case, you may want to try switching to a different medication.
These complexities and nuances are why you want to see a mental-health practitioner.
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That, at least, is what happens to me when my Unipolar Mood Disorder comes out of remission.
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